They came up slowly, in the warm spectrum of yellow – not the flickering fluorescents that cast everything into sick greens and greys that you’d expect in a prison setting. The others that Aptat had mentioned were down here too, all sitting in the bases of their single-occupancy glass chambers, like a galactic menagerie, passively considering us. Being the only obvious humans in the bunch, I would have considered us too. Most of our fellow captives seemed to have legs and arms in roughly human proportions, excepting an extra limb here or there. No blob creatures or tentacle people. Not so much as a pseudopod from where I was standing.
Near the top of each beaker-shaped chamber was an electronic display. Words – I think – rotated across them in different languages. Not like French, German, or Chinese. Like space languages. But no Klingon.38
Apart from Patton and I, there were five others.
The beaker-like chambers were organized into a cluster of seven not dissimilar from a wasp’s brood comb,39 except that they didn’t share walls. It was seven individual cells suspended in a hexagonal pattern with one in the middle: me. Far below us was a large cargo hold. Various boxes and pieces of equipment were secured into tracks on the floor.
Patton was up and pounding on the walls, though I couldn’t hear his protestations. It was like watching TV with the sound off. God only knows where his mind was by this point.
I was less in shock about being surrounded by actual aliens and probably more surprised at my lack of shock. Rather than recoiling in fear at the sight of them, I was intrigued. My brain had already begun churning, horny for science.
These other five were a brilliant example of convergent evolution, the phenomenon whereby different species evolve in a similar fashion even in total isolation from each other.40 It suggested that these prisoners came from places with environments not terribly dissimilar from Earth, giving further weight to a panspermic origin story of life in the galaxy, which was the theory that life has a common source or sources, distributed via meteors. Basically.
A loud clank rang from somewhere above us and the cluster of chambers descended as one from the ceiling, then tilted to forty-five degrees, causing everyone to slump back against the curving glass walls of their cells, including me. I clutched the jar of pickles to my chest as one would an infant and crouched. The other prisoners casually reclined as I fidgeted, terrified the glass holding me in would break. Patton was belly-down in his cylinder like a squirrel cooling its nuts on the sidewalk.41 My ears popped. A pair of eyes caught mine.
This one was lying on their back, hands fondling some contraption on a chain necklace, eyebrows raised like my mom used to do when giving me a few seconds to give up on some bullshit I was into. Their skin was sweet potato purple and they had small holes on the sides of their neck that opened and closed like a stingray’s spiracles. They put their hands out in an earnest sort of chill-out gesture, then, in one smooth motion, moved their fingers to their eyes then out to a point straight ahead. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this alien was trying to give me some advice.